Our Composers and commissioned works:
Philip Herbert – Solicitudo
About Philip
Philip Herbert is an award winning composer who studied music in the UK and the USA. He has enjoyed a portfolio career as an educator, composer and musician, writing vocal music and instrumental music which has been performed by ensembles such as the BBC Singers, the Philharmonia, Chineke!, Royal Ballet Sinfonia, the Sphinx Virtuosi, Detroit, Houston orchestras to name a few, as well as being a part of projects which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4 as well as BBC 2 TV. He has current commissions from Mish Mash Productions, Spitalfields Festival 2021, Minnesota Orchestra, the Nevis Ensemble, EMI Production Music and a Quartet movement for Des Oliver’s, LSO Jerwood Residency, showcase.
About Solicitudo
The backdrop to this piece, is the narrative of how elderly, vulnerable and disabled people were treated across the timescales of the pandemic, when facing critical illness. There were times when relatives were contacted and asked to sign DNR orders, by a doctor, on behalf of an incapacitated patient. This has sparked the process of an Inquiry to protect the rights of vulnerable people which had been violated. The attitude to do away with some patient’s lives if they were of a certain age seemed to be prevalent, rather than trying to treat their condition, during the pandemic.
This piece strives to capture in a microcosm, the journey of a patient who straddles delirium, Parkinson’s, and loss of mobility: whilst relatives experience anxiety, concern, uneasiness, watchful concern and solicitude.
The structure of the piece is ternary form, opening section A, with a dreamy, lyrical theme. In section B there are rising themes which are shrill and articulated with tremolando indications after which there are moments of silence. This section strives to capture the struggle, the anxiety, and fears that a patient has to grapple with in trying to stand to walk, or sit: in an attempt to deal with embracing mobility. Silences are very much a part of this piece. During the pandemic, there were many scenarios, where there were conversations in clinical settings, with patients and relatives. After these events, there were silences. Silences of contemplation of questions about what comes next? What will be the outcome for this patient whose mobility is disappearing? Anxiety, concern, uneasiness, watchful concern become part of these silent episodes.
The final section brings back the theme that was present in the beginning (section A), however here the character of the theme has changed as it is tinged with more dissonance, as well as interruptions with moments of silence. Section A here is indicating the change in the patient’s condition……where the patient and relatives have to contend with the change in the patients condition, on a journey of anxiety, concern, uneasiness, with watchful concern and solicitude (as each person is locked in their own experience of this journey during the pandemic).
-Philip Herbert
VQ Chat – our conversation with Philip from here.
Jasmin Kent Rodgman – where the conflict ends
About Jasmin
British-Malaysian Artist & Composer Jasmin Kent Rodgman brings together the contemporary classical, electronics and sound art worlds to create powerful soundscapes and musical identities. A collaborator across various art forms including dance, word, film and VR, her music often explores otherness, memory and plays with a sense of narrative.
As a Producer, Jasmin adds another level to her portfolio, creating bold new platforms for her music including visual artwork, site-specific installations and multidisciplinary festival productions.
Activism also has an important place within her music. An advocate of gender and racial equality, her wider creative work includes delivering mentorship programmes for young artists, speaking at industry forums and events, and activism projects that seek to empower both community and artists.
About where the conflict ends
where the conflict ends is an expression of frustration. The rage and exhaustion of voicelessness.
The violence of being silenced. Of living in silence.
It is a meeting point of internal tensions between conflicting heritages. A proximity to whiteness and fragile privileges. Our bodies and voices, policed by those who could never understand what it’s like to live in our skin. It is a statement left with no response.
The title, where the conflict ends, comes from a poem by the same name, by the extraordinary lisa luxx, from her recent chapbook Trust Your Outrage. The final line of the poem, in particular, resonates with me:
‘In our bodies the world comes together…’
– Jasmin Kent Rodgman
VQ Chat – our conversation with Jasmin from here.
Robert Fokkens – Spinning, Weaving
About Robert
Robert Fokkens is a South African composer based in the UK. His work explores a range of influences from traditional South African music to 20th– and 21st-century experimental music, via jazz, electronic dance music and the classical canon, creating a music characterised by twisted cycles, rhythmic energy, and microtonal inflections. The Times has described his work as being “fascinating”, “imaginatively orchestrated” and having its “own engaging quirkiness”.
His music is published by Composers Edition and Tetractys Publishing, and his debut CD of chamber music – Tracing Lines – is available on the Métier label. The violin concerto An Eventful Morning Near East London was released on Nimbus in 2017, garnering a range of excellent reviews, BBC Music Magazine describing it as “exquisitely crafted…an arresting work”. His music has also been released on Orchid, Herald, Prima Facie, TUTL and Foundry labels, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio, Swedish Radio P2, Portuguese Radio Antena 2, and various South African radio stations.
Robert is Senior Lecturer in composition at Cardiff University, and regularly gives masterclasses and presentations on his work at other institutions in the UK, Ireland and South Africa.
About Spinning, Weaving
My operatic monodrama Bhekizizwe, written with librettist Mkhululi Mabija and premiered earlier this year as a film by Opera’r Ddraig, tells the story of the title character from his early childhood in apartheid South Africa to studies and parenthood in the UK. When the Villiers Quartet asked me to be part of the From Home project, it struck me that this story of immigration – and the questions around where ‘home’ is which arise as Bhekizizwe starts to build relationships in the UK – connected well with the themes they were looking to explore.
A key moment in Bheki’s life in the UK is meeting and falling in love with a young white British woman, Sarah, presented in the opera as a series of short arias composed over the same ground bass. Spinning, Weaving introduces the materials from two of these arias as a series of fragmented lines and ideas which gradually get spun into musical threads. These threads are ultimately woven together into a passage which is very close to the arias before it again loses focus and dissipates.
-Robert Fokkens
VQ Chat – our conversation with Robert from here.
Alex Ho – Our Common Wealth
About Alex
Alex Ho is a British-Chinese composer based in London. Winner of the George Butterworth Award 2020, Alex has had pieces performed/commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Radio 3, Royal Opera House, National Opera Studio, Music Theatre Wales, London Sinfonietta, and Roderick Williams. His works have featured at SoundState Festival (Southbank Centre, London), Sound Unbound (Barbican Centre, London), Hearing China (Shanghai Symphony Hall, Shanghai), Cheltenham Music Festival, Oxford Lieder Festival, and BBC Late Junction. Alex was joint-winner of the Philip Bates Composition Competition in 2016, one of Sound and Music’s ‘New Voices 2018’, a Help Musicians UK Fusion Fund Artist in 2019, and one of the LSO’s ‘Soundhub’ composers from 2018-2020. He is the co-director of Tangram, an artist collective catalysing transnational imagination and celebrating the vitality of Chinese cultures. Alex is currently studying for a doctorate at the Royal College of Music with a full AHRC scholarship (LAHP studentship supported by RCM).
About Our Common Wealth
‘Our Common Wealth is a small piece of reckoning. It is the reckoning of a structure and an identity that is fragile and crumbling. A structure that is made up of forgotten stories. Forgotten stories about people and their communities. Communities that have wealth. And wealth that is common.’
-Alex Ho
VQ Chat – our conversation with Alex from here.
Florence Anna Maunders – Not Getting Out
About Florence
Florence Anna Maunders started to compose music when she was a teen-aged boy, and her early tape-based pieces from this time reveal an early fascination with the unusual juxtapositions of sounds and collisions of styles which have been a hallmark of her music-making ever since. This is perhaps a reflection of the music which interested and excited her from a very young age – medieval dance music, electronic minimalism, bebop jazz, Eastern folk music, the music of Stravinsky & Messiaen, and the grand orchestral tradition of the European concert hall. Flori started out as a chorister, clarinettist and saxophone player, but following an undergraduate degree at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she studied with Anthony Gilbert, Adam Gorb, Simon Holt & Clark Rundell, she’s enjoyed a mixed and international career as a jazz pianist, orchestral percussionist, vocalist and teacher. She took a long break from composition due to a number of reasons, but returned to seriously composing in 2018, came out, transitioned and over the last few years has enjoyed some enormous success, winning multiple international awards and having her music performed across the globe by a number of prestigious soloists, ensembles and groups.
About Not Getting Out
This piece was written during the spring of 2021 – a time when the UK was forced by the global pandemic back into another extended “lockdown” – a time when we really were not getting out much at all. I was commissioned by the Villiers Quartet to write a new piece which reflected on these times of enforced solitude and “shut-in-ness” and the result was this music of restlessly concentrated energy. There is a lot of obsessive repetition, circling around the fixed pitches of the instruments’ open strings using tight micro-tonal intervals to approach closely to those fixed pitches before looping around and away again. The piece falls into a series of closely linked sections – initially agitated, then angrily frustrated, before circling in an almost static fashion. The music then becomes agitated again, picking up a relentless forwards drive and momentum, which however leads nowhere except flickering figures, insistent repetition and finally total disintegration.
VQ Chat – our conversation with Florence from here.
